Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Thunderstorm at Midkiff
June 25, 2003

I should have heeded the vultures. A dozen vultures were swooping low, riding the downburst winds from the thunderstorm just ahead of me. To go around the severe weather would have been a detour of forty or more miles, so I crammed my hat down low on my head when I decided to brave the storm. I was on my way to co-lead a “forbs and forage” tour of the Holistic Resource Management’s Inc.’s “Demonstration Ranch” south of Ozona, and wanted to arrive well before sundown.

The vultures weren’t flapping, just constantly adjusting their wing tilt, and still they were moving as fast as the oil-field trucks headed in the same direction. Another dozen had already selected fenceposts for waiting out the storm, and sat facing downwind, hunched over in the exaggerated pose that cartoonists hyperbolize. Not another bird was in sight.

To the east just a few miles the skies were black with torrents of wind-whipped rain. Lightning bolts jolted my vision, snapping my head back with instinctive cringing. Somehow lightning on the open prairie makes a person feel overly exposed. It seems as if the bolts are being blindly hurled, and the observer is the only target. I stopped my vehicle at the road junction leading me south to Midkiff, just to admire the scene.

When I was a teen-ager in high school I used to chase thunderclouds, taking my old beater of a 1965 Plymouth into the heart of storms, with Steppenwolf, Black Sabbath, Blind Faith and other such post-Woodstock music on the 8-track stereo blasting my eardrums. Back then I wanted to see St. Elmo’s fire and ball lightning, because my grandfather had told stories about cattledrive stampedes highlighted by such weather peculiarities.

This time, however, I was driving the almost-new midsize SUV that Deborah and I bought for our out-of-town trips. I did not want to get it whacked around by hail. I looked for its tell-tale white curtain of hail within the dark streamers of rain, and when I did not see any, I proceeded on ahead.

Just a mile further the road was wet, but no puddles of water were visible. “The storm is moving east, away from the road,” I said to myself, and settled back against the seat. Within seconds I learned differently. “How come the good Lord is using a firehose on me? Dadgum, I can barely see!” I slowed down, way down, trying to pick out the road in front of me. The car swooped down into a little dip in the road, now full of six inches of water, and the resulting sploosh canceled my vision for a super-long second or two. The wipers cleared the sheet of water just in time for me to see a big workover rig coming at me from the other direction.

I swerved to the side of the road, my wheels leaving the pavement, and immediately the steering wheel bucked in my hands as the vehicle tilted while the tires cut a deep rut. I jerked hard to the left and got the car back on the road. With the stress level ratcheted way up so quickly, I began looking for a ranch entry road at which to stop and wait out the storm. By necessity I was moving slow – only 20 miles per hour -- but what if someone behind me was not? My heartbeat had accelerated, and my hands ached from holding the steering wheel too tightly.

I kept moving on ahead, unable to find such a wide spot. I glanced to the east, and old “Rattlebones”, the death curtain of hail, loomed right over me. The first hailstone hit the sidewindow next to my face, and it sounded like it cracked the glass. I floored the accelerator, instinct telling me to run to get out of the way of the hail, but I immediately had to slow again, unable to see.

More hail pounded the side of the car, and I cringed with every blow. “This is going to ruin the paint job and there will be dents all over the driver’s side! I’m gonna be spending a pretty penny --” I hunched over, grabbing the steering wheel with the sides of my arms as well as my clenched hands. I peered ahead, and to my great relief, I could see low squall line clouds a quarter mile ahead of me – I was near the edge of the deluge.

I left the hail behind, and entered a region of light steady rain. Beyond I could see the edge of the storm, dark black clouds low and severe. “I hope that is not a wall cloud, but I think it is…” I looked up, and almost above me was a circular hole in the darkness – allowing me to peer up a wide chimney-like shaft deep into the heart of the thundercloud.

I turned south from Midkiff, instead of going east on to the junction to Stiles, figuring that the scary cloud over my head was heading that direction and that I should not take any chances. The road ahead of me was perfectly straight for five or six miles, so I soon learned that my sweetheart of an automobile could “do a hundred.” When I slowed for the section-line corner turn in the direction of the Pemberton Compressor Station, another flurry of driving rain caught up with me. “The storm can not be moving as fast as I was driving!”

The storm was growing that fast, though. A shaft of sunlight illuminated the area of rain around me, creating a nearly vertical “spectrum bar” from cloud to ground just to the east of me. What had been thirty minutes before --a cloud-filled sky, filled with puffy clumps, had radically changed – ahead of me was more than fifty miles of clear skies, all the way down to Ozona where I could see a super-sized thunderstorm. Looming malevolently behind me, the thunderstorm I had just escaped, covered most of Glasscock County. As soon as I was in bright sunlight and no rain, I stopped and checked the side of the car for dings, but, by golly, the new composite material used for the side panels showed no evidence of hail damage. Hallelujah!

We west Texans have been praying for rain. Ten years of drought have become overwhelmingly depressive – “it is never going to rain again!” We have not seen lush green pastures in years. To benefit from the blessings of rain that comes during the summer months, we also have to endure other forces so much more powerful than us puny humans. Such a wondrous gift as rain comes with a price that can ruin people, their lives shattered by the severe weather. We Llaneros live where delusions of humankind’s invincibility are revealed as ignorant and prideful self-centeredness.